D.G.

Thoughts

I recently received a question about SGI’s pandora after someone found my run-pandora.sh script in my hpc-admin-scripts repo. They were looking for a way to test a server with a fair bit of memory in a short amount of time. They’d tried Memtest86 and found it to be incredibly slow when running single-threaded or proved too unstable when running on all cores. When they found my repo, they figured it’d be worth asking about pandora in the hopes it would be appropriate for their needs.

I’ve been suffering from some bad computer mojo as of recent.
First our group fileserver tanked. Not that I really came into physical contact with it, but I talked to it over the network all the time. Then my brand spankin’ new NAS drive (got a Buffalo LinkStation, basically an external hard drive enclosure with ethernet instead of USB/Firewire) had some sort of catastrophic firmware failure while I was using it and I was forced to RMA it.

Fairly recently, the company that made our group fileserver was bought up by Sun. So we’re not really sure whether we’ll be able to renew our service contract (which runs out October 20th), or if we’ll be forced to buy a new Sun fileserver at a discount. The cynic in all of us should know what’s coming next…
On Friday, our group fileserver sorta flaked. Took the admins an hour or more to get it back up and running, and when it did our current group mount (ie the one with all the stuff I really care about right now) did not come up with it.

What a relief! Just got news the RAID card has come in, was installed, and with a fair bit of manual tinkering the admins managed to restore access to our unbacked-up mount. They’re in the process of migrating the data elsewhere and we should have a temporary workaround up and running in short order. Looks like we haven’t lost anything since some files have access times from last Friday. Will have to do some testing to see if anything was corrupted, but I’m feeling a whole lot better about it than I was earlier today.

So I’ve decided to hold off on buying a new PC for the foreseeable future. Have been wanting to put together a new gaming box with a semi-current graphics card so that I could play some games. My old Athlon box, polonius, is a bit long in the tooth, and my notebook, laertes, just doesn’t quite cut it on everything. My Dell box, horatio, is fairly current (P4/2.4GHz) from the clunky video (GeForce 4 MX), but until recently I enjoyed using it exclusively as an always-on Linux box.

So Elysium seems to be having more trouble these days. Some games are pretty choppy, just plain refuse to load, etc. Can’t quite decide whether it’s a hardware or software issue. I mean, it’s been a while since I last wiped so that’s a possibility. Also seems there might be some issues with the drivers MS included with XP for my network card. Then there’s the quirks associated with my memory (populating all 3 DIMM slots may not be a Good Thing), and my so-called RAID card (random reboots when the drives get heavily accessed).